Hi everyone!

Just recently, the last mirror of the summer season of OCPC 2025 has concluded. I would like to take this moment to share some of the details and statistics on how it went with the community 😊

ICPC award

Okay, this happened last chronologically, but it's probably most relevant, so I will start with it!

I am at the ICPC WF 2025 in Baku, Azerbaijan this week. And the main reason for this is, I got the ICPC Foundation outstanding community engagement award Outstanding Community Engagement Award for demonstrating exceptional dedication to the organization and success of ICPC training camps and fostering excellence and collaboration across borders!

It is a very important milestone for us, and I am very happy that OCPC gets the recognition on the highest level! You can read a bit more about this in my LinkedIn post, and also watch the award clip on YouTube.

That said, if you're also at the WF, and would like to chat with me, or take a commemorative picture together, feel free to find me 🤗

By the way, we also have a dedicated channel for the ICPC WF at the Discord server that I announced 3 weeks ago, so it might be an easy and convenient way to find someone, or participate in the latest discussions. Feel free to join!

Winners

Now, let's celebrate those who managed to come on top in all editions of the camp (per UCup style ratings):

Note: You may notice that both Jakarta and Pune sites had some remote participants. Nevertheless, only remote participants of the main window were counted in a separate category, as they were international and very diverse, while Pune and Jakarta sites still almost exclusively had remote participants from the corresponding region.

Participation stats

We had a total of 72 teams participating in the summer edition of the camp across various sites that we had. Traditionally, summer participation is sizeably lower than winter ones, so we're happy to see that, for the first time, we have a number of teams participating in summer exceed one of the (previous) participation rates for winter.

Still though, we have certain ideas how to boost participation even further next year, so stay tuned! 😊

Bucharest site

If it comes as a surprise: That's right, this summer our main location was the University of Bucharest, and not Osijek! We tried to change the place for several reasons, but most important among them are:

• As we organize mirror events, it's a great way to get a first-hand experience with possible caveats that we did not encounter before;
• When hosting in Osijek, we were getting a lot of complaints about Osijek being difficult to reach, so we tried a more accessible city;
• We would like to network and collaborate with local communities more actively, and it seemed a great opportunity to do so;

I really hope that participants enjoyed the brief change of scenery, and we also definitely got a lot of useful data to think about, so we can better shape our future events and focus on what's important in organizing them. I would like to sincerely thank Livia Magureanu (livlivi) for all the help with organizing this!

As is the tradition, two of the days in our schedule were dedicated rest days, and our participants had a chance to go to indoors carting and paintball, and the camp concluded with a dinner for all participants to socialize and reminisce on their experience in the camp.

Scheduling

We also learnt our lesson that we should really try to announce the camp earlier in advance, to make sure teams have sufficient time to prepare and book time accordingly. Unfortunately the timing of announcement was particularly bad this summer, which also seemed to have affected at least two teams that were otherwise willing to attend onsite, but unfortunately were not able to book visa appointments in time. We will do everything we can to avoid similar situations in the future!

Such early camp timing on our end mainly related to the fact that, when we were sending out availability polls to potential participants, overwhelming majority of European participants indicated that they're not available at all from July to September due to internships and other conflicting events, leaving June as the only possible month before the ICPC WF when they might be available. And, again unfortunately, even for June many people were not able to participate, as it is the exam season in European universities.

To add insult to injury, the particular camp week also coincided with a heatwave in Bucharest, with the temperature sometimes going up to 37°C, thus making it very hard to be outside or in a place with poor air conditioning.

While I can't yet provide more specific details, I can assure you that we're well aware of the issues described above, and we're actively figuring out counter-measures for them right now.

Pune site

This year, Arpa put me in contact with Enigma27, whose organization, GoForGold (by Newton School of Technology), was making training camps in India. In particular, in summer they organize Elite Camp, which is the camp aimed for world finalists from India. I was very happy with how the collaboration turned out, with us providing the contests, and Newton School providing the venue, paying for participants accommodations and meals, etc.

As they were also looking for mentors for the camp, I jumped on this opportunity to visit India again (I visited Bengaluru in 2019 for CodeChef SnackDown finals), so I ended up being one of two mentors (alongside Arpa himself) for the camp!

I conducted three post-contest discussion sessions, and one lecture (on single-processor parallelism, SIMD, and generally modern ways to make computations significantly faster while still only using single processor core, as is the case in competitive programming setups).

On a leisure day, we also had opportunity to visit Sinhagad fort in the Sahyadri Mountains, which was an amazing experience!

Thank you very much GoForGold team for organizing this, I hope to collaborate again in the future!

Jakarta site

Finally, a continuation of our previous efforts to establish a mirror in APAC!

We moved the main site to Jakarta, Indonesia this time, as I was advised that the Singapore site, while it attracted a lot of participants last time, was pretty expensive to stay at. We tried to move the camp to a cheaper location, which is why this time we tried organizing it on the premises of the BINUS University.

Unfortunately, the results here were very mixed, as only 3 teams attended the event onsite, while 12 more teams from the region requested to participate remotely. This caught us completely off-guard, as this also included some teams from Jakarta region itself. As a matter of fact, less people participated onsite than indicated willingness to do so in the preliminary availability polls! This was also a surprise for us, as in other regions situation is typically the opposite.

This is, of course, another lesson to learn for us, and in the future we will make sure to do a more thorough job ensuring minimal reasonable amount of onsite participants before fixing a mirror site, or introduce contingency plans for such scenarios.

I nevertheless hope that participating in the mirror was an enjoyable experience for participants, even despite unexpectedly smaller numbers, and well, as one of the participants said, it makes the souvenir t-shirts for this site even more exclusive, right? 🥲

In any case, I want to sincerely thank Yoshiyuki for organizing this mirror site!

Future plans

Alright, so... First things first, let's address the scheduling thing right away.

We plan to host our next camp on January 24 — February 1, 2026 in Osijek!

We will make announcement for specific dates at the latest in December 2025 in our Discord server, and possibly a bit lately on Codeforces and via direct invitation letters, as we will need to finalize our sponsors for next year before doing so.

That said, if you really need to know specific dates earlier, especially if you need visa support, or any other special preparations, please do not hesitate to reach out directly to us, and we will make sure to let you know as soon as we can.

We preliminary already have 7 contests pending, but if you would like to propose a contest, please reach out to us nevertheless. It never hurts to have a reserve in case something goes wrong, and we would gladly schedule your contest for one of the next camps otherwise.

Mirror sites

Finally, we're still very open to holding mirror camps around the world, especially in regions with historically low representation in OCPC. Please reach out to me if you are interested in hosting a mirror, or know anyone who might be. Potential host must provide a venue capable of accommodating appropriate number of teams, or have a clear idea on how to get one. Any of the following is a big plus:

• Can directly cover accommodations and meals for the participants;
• Have contacts with local sponsors, or represent organization that may serve as one;
• Have 1-2 strong participants in the region who might be interested to get hired to conduct local analysis sessions;
• Have good connections to local competitive programming communities, and can assess whether enough people would participate;

Please help us make OCPC more accessible and useful for coders around the world!

Reviews

Okay, if you read to this part, I yet have just one request for you if you participated in OCPC previously.

Would you kindly consider filling the review form for us? 🤗

Unlike our regular feedback form, the reviews are inteded to be public facing, and thus I'd like to post some on the website to help shape future participant's understanding of what the camp is like, whether it is useful, etc. I really hope that we could help and be useful to someone in their competitive programming journey, and if it is the case, you can help us greatly in return by filling the form 😊